Drumming as art

I live for this.

Pneuma live drum cam

Can’t believe I’m including this after the Phil Collins overload of high school. But this song has the most unique, most intriguing feel - is it pushing? is it pulling? Whatever it is, it gives this song a kind of restrained, passionate fever that I’ve never heard anywhere else.

What is the best album for drum tones and why ?

12. Transcendence . Extra stuff Mistakes Solos . Live gig reviews Live reviews (more live gig reviews on my personal blog)

I’m a visual person. Even though music is an auditory medium, my experience is all about the images it conjures up. If the drum tones make me think of warm buttery caramel, I think ‘he’s a Kaloper type’. If the drumsticks dance restlessly across the snare in a light, tight pattern, I think ‘he’s heading towards Mitch Mitchell’. After a while a sort of map started forming in my head, a multi-dimensional spectrum of drumming styles, and whenever I heard a new beat I’d try to place it on that map.

Wow.

Billy Rymer drum clinic @ The Drum Cartel, Brisbane February 2014. 
Billy came to the clinic straight from his US flight, tired, jet-lagged, and without having played mathcore in months. He was quite apologetic. A roomful of Brisbane’s keenest drummers merely nodded, fully aware that their minds were about to be blown across the walls. 
The clinic was a mix of insane drumming, tips, and just general conversation. Billy is a natural born teacher. He was just as interested in what the group had to tell him as in what he wanted to say. 
I was constantly surprised at how scientific his approach is. He talked about breaking themes down into their component parts and applying theoretical rules. DEP may sound like chaos, but it’s the kind of chaos built by professors of advanced chaos theory.
I took notes because there was too much good stuff to miss. If you mentally insert a lot of dropped jaws and “what … the fuck … just happened??” it’ll be just like being there. (No it won’t.) 
On drumming technique - 
Breathing: try 6 breaths in, 8 breathes out - gives more control. Get more out of your oxygen. Helps with stamina while playing. He also said sometimes with DEP it comes down to survival mode where you ‘just have to get the notes out of the body’. 
Feet excercises: sit in a chair and tap feet up and down as though using pedals. Then inch your heels further and further back underneath the chair while still tapping them - it gets really hard on the shins. 
Try the Moeller technique: use a whipping motion and let the bounce work for you, so you get 2 or 3 more beats for free. 
Paradiddle limbo: have have someone hold a stick horizontally above the practise pad, then play paradiddles underneath without hitting the horizontal stick. Then progressively lower the limbo bar. Helps to expand your dynamic range downwards. It’s more difficult to play soft (with very small controlled strokes) than loud. 
On the importance of getting variety into drumming, any way you can - 
Vary the dynamics - dynamic range is the main source of a drummer’s expressiveness. (Only thing is, Billy plays so strongly that when he plays quietly it’s exactly the same as when he plays loudly. Except for the volume, if that makes sense.) 
Vary the speed: not on a continuous spectrum but stepwise. Instead of starting slow and getting progressively faster, sit on a randomly set speed for a while (eg. 120bpm) then move to another one (eg. 80). It’s easy to steadily increase speed, but stepwise changes need much more control. 
Transformation: great way to mix up the timing. You need a boring rhythm to use as a reference, like a simple bass line or click track. Then you re-imagine it by playing a new rhythm over the top, putting accents in weird places relative to the boring beat. For example starting a phrase on the 2nd beat of the bar, then starting on the 3rd, and so on. 
Transformations also helps with knowing where 1 is without playing it. Knowing where 1 is but not playing it helps you build your own internal clock. Also if you don’t play 1 for a while, the tension builds. (He’s not kidding about this. Check out his drum battle with Mike Portnoy for perfect examples.) 
Flams: another way to mix it up is flams spread across two different drums, or between a drum and a cymbal. 
Change the accents: change the part of the kit you hit at each accent. 
Play dynamically: even in the studio, don’t leave it all to post-production. 
Mix yourself: cymbals quiet, kick loud. 
On Dillinger and the genius that is Ben Weinman: 
Ghost notes help with the overall feel. (As he was talking I was picturing faint pencil sketches extending beyond the strongly inked outlines, giving more context and meaning to a picture). But because of the way DEP produce their albums, ghost notes are not picked up. Steve Evetts has the drums deliberately turned down so it’s difficult to hear ghost notes. That might be frustrating for a drummer, but it makes the timing so much fun to listen to. Because we mainly hear the accents, which of course are are all in weird places relative to a standard beat, all we hear is crazy mixed-up timing. Our ears don’t get much hint of the underlying structure that might link it to a normal rhythm. DEP never gives us a chance to get our bearings. 
Billy said he learnt DEP songs as small chunks of music vocabulary - learn those and string them together. DEP don’t count out their time signatures (no surprise). 
Ben sometimes says to play something crazy, then he records it and shuffles chunks of it electronically, just like he’s shuffling cards, until it ends up as something else and then he tells Billy - “ok now play that”. (I seriously died of cool when he said this. There is no other way to explain some of the shit those freaks come up with.) 
One of the grooves on ‘One Of Us Is The Killer’ grew out of a theme that kept being repeated but, on Ben’s instructions, with different accents each time. 
He also said, with DEP, playing the right notes isn’t as important as conveying the right attitude and emotion. 
Towards the end, Billy was asked to play a track that defines him as a drummer. He started playing a rock hip kind of thing …. strong was the main word I’d use to describe it. Then he went into a 43%-ish riff then he broke off and said - “I’ve just realised I don’t have a single track that defines me as a drummer”. That right there, is what defines him as a drummer. May we eternally give thanks. 
Thumbnails from (https://www.facebook.com/liketoddmcfarlane/posts/748129001897851)

P.S. Matt and Sascha - hope you enjoyed the show!

It’s not every day you see two guys and a suitcase entertaining a pub crowd on a rainy night. A surprisingly cool way to jam.

Jon Theodore on fire. He absolutely dominated the stage with QOTSA. Immense, powerful sound, monster drumming, perfect fit for the band. We had some serious musicians up on stage that night but he effortlessly outclassed them all. Oh yes, and I thought his steel Ludwigs couldn't be bested until I heard him on DW. During the setup a roadie hit the kick drum, just once, and the entire stadium erupted. Monstrous.